Thursday, November 10

Fragment 10

I found as many chapters as I could. And I called my work - apparently, I hadn't gone in for four months. I am definitely unemployed now. My landlady says I haven't paid the rent in four months, too. And I still have no idea what happened to me.

The chapters I found were scattered around the room, under the bed, stuck in the drawer - some of them even in the Gideon Bible. I put them all in order, but there are still a lot missing. I don't know why I would have done this. I don't know anything anymore.

But some part of me is saying that it's important that I keep posting these fragments. So here we go.

The heist went wrong almost immediately. We knew we probably couldn't find "genuine 20th cent garb" in time for the party, so we decided it was better to dress up as staff. There are always staff in those parties, human waiters instead of bot-waiters to show just how classy and rich the place is. All we had to do was steal a couple of uniforms and sneak in.

Which was easier said than done. The uniforms were easy to come by, but getting in required clearance passes. Canto's ID-chip would get him anywhere, but it would also alert everyone that the son of Architect Arkos was in the building. And we didn't want that. In fact, Canto wanted to stay as far away from his father as possible.

So we had to forge clearance passes. Luckily, Guillemet came in handy with that. He still felt guilty over the Golconda incident, so he helped out with the passes, inputting all the relevant data that he skimmed off of the cloudsite. And so we were in.

And we were immediately overwhelmed. There were so many people there, I didn't know how the waiters were even able to walk around. They covered the floors and the raised platforms and even some super-expensive elevator platforms that used cushioned air to lift the guests high up, so they could look down at everyone.

We slipped away, through a corridor, and then into a regular elevator and went up, up into the top levels of the Spire.

Getting the information should have been easy. Canto opens the room, scans his ID-chip, and the information is immediately downloaded into his system at home.

Unfortunately, when we got to the room where Canto had stored the Archive information, there was a slight problem: it was empty.

"I don't understand," Canto said. "It was here. Twenty databanks of information. No one would have moved it. No one even knew it was here. I even had this room blanked on the map."

"It doesn't matter," I said. "Someone took it. Maybe they knew what it was, maybe they didn't, but it's not here anymore."

And that's where things went even more wrong.

"Hello, son," a deep voice said. Canto and I turned to see a man in his late forties, black hair with graying temples. The Architect Arkos. Head of the Assembly of Architects, creators of the Pinnacle City. "Glad to see you again."